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Planet Labs co-founders Chris Boshuizen (left), Robbie Schingler (middle), and Will Marshall horse around with a Dove at their office in San Francisco, California.

STARTUP LIFTOFF How flocks of small, cheap satellites, hatched in Silicon Valley, will constantly monitor a changing Earth

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ats of homebrewed porter and brown ale ferment under a lunchroom table. In the corner lie a drum kit and guitar, property of Hank and the Doves, the company’s pop cover band. Emma the dog roams—and sheds—freely. In some ways, Planet Labs is your typical Silicon Valley startup. But

it’s not where you’d expect to see the precision assembly of space satellites. “In terms of overall cleanliness, we just don’t care,” says co-founder Chris Boshuizen, who wears a droopy Santa hat in preparation for an office holiday party on this rainy December day in San Francisco. Boshuizen pushes aside strips of clear vinyl sheeting and enters what he calls the

“clean enough” room. He stomps on a mat of sticky tape that helps eliminate static charges that could zap satellite electronics— a rare precaution. Beyond another line of tape, no alcohol is allowed. There a shelf is stocked with the company’s product: space telescopes no bigger than a loaf of bread. Two dozen of these telescopes, called Doves, already orbit the Earth, imaging the sciencemag.org SCIENCE

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PHOTO: DEANNE FITZMAURICE

By Eric Hand, in San Francisco, California

ILLUSTRATION: JAMESON SIMPSON

ground with a resolution good enough to pick out treetops, roads, and buildings. Another 14 are set to ride into orbit next week on a SpaceX cargo rocket. Although heftier spacecraft can spy on Earth with higher resolution, few can match the repeat rate at which one craft in Planet Labs’ swarm passes over the same patch of ground. If the company can get between 150 and 200 Doves in orbit, it will be able to take a daily snapshot of the entire planet. This time-lapse flipbook will reveal flooding on rivers, logging in forests, and road building in cities, as they happen. Change is the name of the game—and the main attraction for researchers and commercial clients. Boshuizen says the company has contracts in place that are worth more than the $135 million in venture capital funding it has so far received. From the shelf, Boshuizen grabs a Dove. Though it is destined for orbit, he handles it as roughly as he would the phone in his pocket. He doesn’t worry about damage, because the inexpensive electronics inside it are similar to the phone’s. The nonchalance is all part of the plan. Plenty of Doves have fizzled out in orbit or fallen back to Earth and burned up in the atmosphere. But that’s OK, because more Doves are always ready to take wing. For decades, engineers have been building satellites like bespoke Swiss watches, sparing no expense and spending years to perfect them. More than 1000 people in 17 countries have had a hand in building the $8 billion James Webb Space Telescope, more than a decade in the making. Once launched in 2018, the Webb telescope will never be made again. At Planet Labs, Doves are mass produced to the brink of disposability; in 2015, the company is aiming for a sustained production rate of 25 Doves a month. Boshuizen says the cost of building and launching each Dove is well under $1 million. Mass production lets engineers experiment with the satellites and launch them in aggressive, iterative cycles. In less than 2 years, Planet Labs has gone from Dove 1.0 to sending version 12 into space. Yet the ratio of total Doves launched (99) to employees (105) is still about one. “It changes because we keep hiring,” Boshuizen says. “But we also keep building satellites.” Much of Planet Labs’ success can be attributed to a decision to squeeze their ambitions into a very small box, a specific form factor called a CubeSat. Named after their characteristic 10-centimeters-a-side size, CubeSats were first launched in 2003 as an educational tool—a way for graduate students to get something in space (see sidebar, p. 176). The little boxes beeped and did little else. But fueled by the massive investment

I spy with my little eye Each Dove must fit within a “3U” box measuring 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters by 34 centimeters, or three CubeSats’ worth of space. The telescope is pointed with the help of a star tracker, reaction wheels, and electromagnetic torquers. Solar panels Circuitry

Camera Radio antenna Reaction wheels

Telescope Batteries

Solar panels

in consumer electronics, the size and cost Mountain View, California. Boshuizen and of most satellite components—radios, comanother physicist, Will Marshall, recall a puters, solar panels—have plummeted even senior Ames engineer waving around a as their capabilities have exploded. At the government-issued smart phone, declaring same time, CubeSat builders have found that it had more computing power than the new and cheaper ways to get into orbit: average satellite. Why not just launch the packed into spare payload space around smart phone? he asked. “We eventually took larger satellites, or stowed on cargo flights him seriously,” Boshuizen says. “We got a to the International Space Station. In 2014, smart phone, stuck it in a vacuum chamber, a record 132 CubeSats and it still worked.” It were launched—and turned out that costly 93 of them were Doves, “rad-hard” parts, built according to Jonathan to withstand the vacMcDowell, an astronouum of space and its mer at the Harvardradiation environment, Smithsonian Center weren’t so important. for Astrophysics in “Perhaps you’ve been Cambridge, Massachulied to with this whole Robbie Schingler, Planet Labs setts, who tracks satelnotion that things need lite launches. to be space-qualified,” McDowell says CubeSats are gripping Boshuizen says. After all, he notes, astronauts the aerospace industry and changing the on the barely shielded space station use iPads. way business—and science—is done. “Now (The more intense radiation of deep space, you’re seeing not just student projects, but however, might pose a threat to future CubeSats deployed by the military, by space CubeSat missions to other planets, which agencies—doing real jobs,” he says. Jordi would venture outside Earth’s protective Puig-Suari, the co-founder of the CubeSat magnetic field.) standard, concurs. “These little guys are fiIn 2010, Boshuizen and Marshall assemnally ready to do serious missions,” he says. bled a PhoneSat team at Ames. They took And one upstart company is leading the an HTC Nexus One smart phone out of its charge, he adds: “Planet Labs is the darling case, reprogrammed its Android operating of the CubeSat community.” system, and added extra batteries and a radio that would downlink pictures to Earth. IN THE LATE 2000s, small satellites were Total cost: about $3500. In 2013, the first still a curiosity, but a buzz was in the air three PhoneSats were launched. Two of at NASA’s Ames Research Center near them lacked solar panels, but they took and

“What happens when anyone on the planet can understand the state of the world?”

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Two Doves are expelled from the International Space Station on 27 February 2015.

has publicly announced only a few, but Boshuizen talks about several areas of commercial interest. A primary one is agricultural: the ability to monitor the productivity of fields. Environmental compliance is another—for instance, mining companies wishing to show that they have restored an area to the correct standard. A third area is in commercial mapping: By monitoring the growth of roads and homes, Planet Labs can identify areas where Internet mapping companies need to concentrate their data-gathering efforts. Plenty of scientists would also like to get their hands on Planet Labs data, says Curtis Woodcock, a geographer at Boston University and co-leader of the science team for Landsat, the venerable series of Earthmonitoring satellites operated by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Woodcock says officials routinely ask Landsat scientists what the satellites could do better, and the answer is always the same: Make more frequent passes over each patch of Earth. Daily snapshots could help home in on the sciencemag.org SCIENCE

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PHOTOS: (TOP TO BOTTOM) USGS/NASA LANDSAT; PLANET LABS

sent back pictures in the week before their and get it 3D-printed, while another would batteries ran down. “We bet the farm on work on orbital simulations. this idea that we could launch a phone into In designing the Doves, the group chose space and that it would work,” Boshuizen a frame the size of three stacked classays. “And it did.” sic CubeSats: 10 centimeters square and Even before the PhoneSats were launched, 34 centimeters long. They found that QueBoshuizen and Marshall began talking star telescopes—used by hobbyists for more about taking the idea further with a third than half a century—fit the space perfectly, friend, Robbie Schingler, who was working so they ordered a couple of custom ones for the chief technologist at NASA headfashioned out of Invar, a thermally stable quarters in Washington, D.C. The fastnickel-iron alloy. They pointed Questars out talking trio knew each other from long bethe garage door to test settings on megafore: They had met at a 2002 Space Generapixel cameras attached to the rear of the tion Summit in Houston, a workshop for scopes. Occasionally, they would cross the young space evangelists. “The day I showed bay to Lick Observatory, set up a receiver up [there], I decided they were my people,” antenna, and test the strength of their radio. Boshuizen says. “We were not naive,” Howard says. “We had In December 2010, they registered their come from NASA and had seen the so-called own company, initially called Cosmogia. right way to design a satellite. We were very They talked about many possible business aware that we were doing something differmodels, including a constellation of Cubeent and risky.” Sats that would provide global Internet. Soon, they had assembled mostly offThey ultimately decided that an Earththe-shelf parts into a working satellite that imaging mission carried they were willing to send fewer risks and was a to space. With their perservice for which there sonal savings, the three is growing business deco-founders booked a mand. “Frankly, we chose $250,000 spot on the to do the remote-sensing maiden flight of Orbital mission because we had Sciences’ Antares rocket, a higher probability of in April 2013. success,” Schingler says. Michael Safyan, anEven though the team other early employee, says had no funding and no he didn’t sleep much durway of paying anyone, ing the 6 days that Dove-1 Ames engineers like lived. The team was ecBen Howard were eager static when a 4.5-meter to join. “They had a big radio dish in Chilbolton, idea for what to do with U.K., captured the first these CubeSats,” he says. image: a patch of forest in “I also didn’t think they the Pacific Northwest, in were crazy.” such good focus that they For most of 2011, they could count the trees. “We worked out of the “Rainhad no idea if the thing bow Mansion,” a sixwould even turn on,” bedroom house in CuSafyan says. “It was such pertino, California, that A fire in a Brazilian field is captured by a huge validation that we Marshall and Schingler a Dove (bottom) a day after the same were on the right track.” had rented in 2006 and spot was imaged by Landsat (top). By that time, the fledgpacked with like-minded ling company had moved people. With house policies achieved by out of the garage and into its San Francisco consensus and weekly salons given by the office. More Doves entered orbit, and the likes of physicist Roger Penrose and Interimages they took began to stitch together net activist Lawrence Lessig, the house is the patchwork quilt of Earth. The Planet like a “hippie commune except it’s mostly Labs team started to notice changes. The filled with tech geeks,” Howard says. boundaries of pit mines expanded. In Rio Like so many Silicon Valley startups, the de Janeiro, they saw that favelas had been group began working out of the garage. bulldozed in the weeks leading up to the They pushed camping equipment to the 2014 World Cup. They even noticed plumes side and hung a stop sign from the ceiling of smoke over a patch of ground in Califorto keep random Rainbow residents out. The nia—an incipient forest fire. “It was just team worked on couches, hunched over 10 minutes old,” Howard says. laptops loaded with computer-aided design Investors began to line up, and customsoftware. One person might design a part ers began to sign contracts. Planet Labs

PHOTO: NASA

moments when forests green up in the spring. “It’s becoming more volatile and has shifted earlier in many places as a result of changing climate,” Woodcock says. Another scientific application, he says, is nailing the timing of snowmelt, which is hard to predict and has big implications for water management. But with an entire earth to survey and just two working satellites, Landsat 7 and 8, an 8-day repeat rate is the best Landsat can manage, Woodcock says. To be sure, the big orbiters have 11 spectral bands to the Doves’ three basic color bands and a heritage that ensures that images are precisely calibrated from one mission to the next. “The scientific community functions in the measurement domain,” Woodcock says. “Whether Planet Labs is going to make it from the picture world to the measurement world is still up in the air.” But Doves, with 3- to 5-meter resolution, already outperform the 15-meter resolution of Landsat 8—although other Earth-imaging services can do even better. DigitalGlobe, for example, provides satellite imagery that has a resolution of better than a meter, but tasking the company’s fleet of six truck-sized satellites to get a new image

for a specific area can take a week or two and is expensive. Another company, SkyBox, plans to launch a constellation of two dozen satellites the size of mini-refrigerators—still small by typical aerospace standards, but much bigger than the Doves—that are also capable of reaching submeter resolution. (Google paid $500 million to buy Skybox last June.) Still other imaging companies are developing drones for jobs such as highresolution monitoring of oil and gas pipelines. But Boshuizen says the Doves can complement those efforts—for example, by flagging changes that drones or more capable satellites can then examine in more detail. “I view them as our customers, not competitors,” he says. Although Planet Labs is trying to make money, the three co-founders exude humanitarian idealism. For example, they say they hope someday to make Planet Labs data free—perhaps, Boshuizen says, by charging only for the newest images or for access to large numbers of images, as Google Maps does. They say their tiny telescopes could allow watchdog groups to monitor environmental degradation, or

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let human rights groups keep tabs on the size of refugee camps and the movements of marauding militias. Schingler says the Doves will empower people who have never before had access to daily geospatial data. “What happens when anyone on the planet can understand the state of the world?” he asks. Power dynamics will shift markedly, Marshall says: “Not everyone’s going to like it. We’re very cognizant of that.” Planet Labs’ way of doing business could be equally transformative, McDowell says. The whole notion of doing Earth observation via constellations of small satellites poses a threat to the old order, in which large aerospace companies build expensive, large satellites for agencies like NASA. For example, Landsat 8, launched in 2013, was built by Orbital Sciences at a total cost of $855 million. USGS is planning a replacement Landsat mission, and budget realities mean it will have to be cheaper than its predecessors. Boshuizen says Planet Labs does not intend to formally compete to replace Landsat but would be happy to sell its data to USGS. The company has also discussed other missions: CubeSats stuffed with sensors rather 10 APRIL 2015 • VOL 348 ISSUE 6231

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THE FINAL MONTHS OF 2014 brought

major changes to Planet Labs, and one big challenge. It started on 28 October, when 26 Doves—known as Flock 1d—were scheduled to ride into space aboard an Orbital Sciences Antares cargo rocket bound for the space sta-

TV webcast. Also in keeping with tradition, Marshall delivered a prelaunch briefing. The Doves, he explained, were locked inside special deployers, wrapped in bubble wrap, and strapped down in the capsule, alongside food, water, and experiments destined for the space station. He reminded his listeners that launches were uncertain: Delays could occur at the last second, failure was always possible, and everything was out of their hands. At 3:22 p.m. Pacific Time, the rocket lumbered off the launch pad. Fifteen seconds later, one of the engines exploded; then a larger fireball engulfed the entire rocket. “There were gasps of shock,” Marshall recalls. In a single moment, the company had lost a huge chunk of its assets. For an old-school space mission, it would have been a shattering blow. In 2009, for example, another Orbital Sciences rocket fell into the ocean while After this Antares cargo rocket exploded on 28 October 2014, attempting to deliver into space the Planet Labs scrambled to get new Doves into orbit. Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO),

Thinking inside the box By Eric Hand

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hy a 10-centimeter cube? The trademark size of the CubeSat emerged somewhat accidently, recalls Jordi Puig-Suari, an aerospace engineer at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. Student-built satellites date back to the 1980s, but they were often unwieldy, stuffed with dubious hardware from RadioShack and auto parts stores. Not only were they expensive to launch, but commercial rocketeers were also wary of packing them alongside primary payloads. In 1999, Puig-Suari met with Bob Twiggs, at the time an aerospace engineer at Stanford University, to discuss ways of getting more student projects into space. “We had to do something to get more opportunities to launch these things,” recalls Twiggs, now at Morehead State University in Kentucky. They focused on slimming down the spacecraft, because weight drives up the cost of reaching orbit. Over lunch at a sandwich shop in San Luis Obispo, Twiggs and Puig-Suari sketched out options on a napkin. They thought hard about the potential capabilities of a 10-centimeter cube with a mass

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tion. The launch, from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, was the company’s seventh. At the Planet Labs office in San Francisco, Schingler made pancakes in the lunchroom— a launch-day tradition at the company—and served them to 70 or so employees and guests who had gathered to watch a NASA

limit of 1 kilogram—the size and weight of a liter of water. Clad in solar cells, the cube would eke out perhaps a watt of power, enough to power a small computer and a radio: “a Sputnik,” Puig-Suari says. Back at Stanford, Twiggs found the perfect life-size demonstration model: a plastic box used for storing the insanely popular stuffed animals known as Beanie Babies. A standard was born. In 2003, the first six student projects rode a Russian Eurockot into orbit, for about $30,000 a pop. Companies quickly sprang up, selling standard components, such as a chassis or radio, allowing university teams to focus on instrumentation. Many groups settled on the “3U” form factor—three CubeSats’ worth of space, the size of Planet Labs’ Doves—as the ideal balance of compactness and capability. Early on, the biggest single expense was the rocket ride. Here, too, Twiggs and Puig-Suari offered an important innovation: Poly Picosatellite Orbital Deployers, or P-PODs. These spring-loaded boxes keep CubeSats quarantined from the main payload, then fling them into space. With time, the P-POD and its kin earned the trust of the world’s major rocket launchers. Even U.S. military and spy agencies now accommodate CubeSats if a rocket has thrust to spare. In recent years, launch prices have stayed put around $100,000 for a 1U CubeSat, Twiggs says. There are free ways

to space, too: In 2010, NASA started subsidizing a dozen or more launches per year with its CubeSat Launch Initiative, which takes CubeSats to the International Space Station, where they are released into space. Reaching orbit will become even easier when a handful of companies develop dedicated CubeSat launchers, PuigSuari says. One of the first may be Super Strypi, a rail-launched U.S. military rocket that is scheduled to carry a dozen CubeSats to orbit in October. The CubeSat trend soon caught the attention of Therese Moretto Jorgensen, a program director for space weather research at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in Arlington, Virginia. “They were seen very much as toys,” she says. “But we decided to give it a go.” In 2008, she organized NSF’s first solicitation for CubeSats grants. She received about 30 proposals for the grants, which typically award 3-year funding of $900,000—enough to build a CubeSat but a tiny fraction of a conventional spacecraft’s cost. The first NSF winner to fly was the Radio Aurora Explorer (RAX), launched in 2010. It sought to understand turbulent bubbles in the ionosphere by observing how radio waves from ground radar stations scattered off the bubbles into space. The RAX team found that bubbles were smaller and more confined than expected. “It produced this beautiful data,” Jorgensen says. “It gave us a lot of confidence to keep doing things.”

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than telescopes. “You could do radar, lidar; you could do GPS augmentation or replacement,” Boshuizen says. “We could move on to do things like earth science, atmospheric science, science in low-Earth orbit; we could do astrophysics and heliophysics, in part.” Pete Worden, director of NASA Ames, is proud that the people and ideas behind Planet Labs were incubated there—even if their visionary approach comes back to haunt NASA centers. “Applying Silicon Valley to aerospace is the most revolutionary thing that’s happened probably since Goddard built his rocket,” he says. “It’s not surprising that it started here. But it’s spreading.”

of view, and the other had an experimental infrared filter on top of the three needed for color pictures. The SpaceX launch was delayed twice. When it finally took place—on 10 January 2015 at Cape Canaveral in Florida—Planet Labs was already in the middle of its next big project: boxing up to move. The new headquarters, a few blocks away, boasted exposed brick walls and wood beams, breathing room for the growing staff, and space for brand-name diagnostic equipment such as a ThermoStream, a machine for pumping hot air into chambers to test the resilience of circuits and other equipment. The dogfriendly policy was being rescinded (primarily because of a new employee’s allergy, Boshuizen says). The launch itself signaled another transformation for the company: In contrast to October’s drama of loss and recovery, it was routine. Schingler watched from a laptop at another of his communal compounds, in the jungle of Costa Rica. Marshall was in Florida, watching the predawn launch of the SpaceX

Many early CubeSats tackled problems in space weather, an ideal field for in situ observations, but other areas of science are opening up as teams shrink and refine instruments. In January, ExoCube launched with a mass spectrometer, the first ever on a CubeSat, designed to measure the composition of the exosphere and ionosphere. In March, the Micro-sized Microwave Atmospheric Satellite was released from the space station. It will carry a microwave radiometer, an instrument typically found on billion-dollar weather satellites, which can map the 3D thermal structure of storms or the presence of sea ice. And in 2013, the NSF funded the Optical Profiling of the Atmospheric Limb CubeSat. When it flies in a few years, it will contain a “hyperspectral” instrument that will measure the temperature of the outermost atmosphere during magnetic storms by imaging it in 100 different spectral bands. Similar instruments could one day be aimed at the ground to map vegetative health, ocean algae blooms, or mineral deposits. Some scientists think CubeSats can play a role far beyond low-Earth orbit. NASA has begun work on Mars Cube One, twin 6U CubeSats that will hitch a ride on InSight, a Mars lander scheduled for launch next year, and help relay its data back to Earth. Other NASA projects plan to equip CubeSats with solar sails—thin reflective sheets that use sunlight for propul-

The swarm cometh

Falcon 9 rocket in person for the first time. In San Francisco, Boshuizen went out for dinner and returned to the soon-to-be-old office around midnight. With only a handful of employees hanging around so late, there was no need for a prelaunch briefing. Or pancakes. Boshuizen, lead guitarist for Hank and the Doves, picked up his guitar and started to noodle around. “What else do you do on a Friday night?” he asks. “We were just sitting around chatting and drinking.” A few more employees trickled in on their way home from San Francisco’s bars and clubs. Finally, the countdown came at 1:47 a.m. Pacific Time. Boshuizen, remembering how hard his team had worked to get the two Doves on board, watched nervously as the Falcon 9 roared off the launch pad, a streak of orange in the humid Florida night. He kept his eyes fixed on the video screen for another 10 minutes, until both the first and second stages had cut out—until the big bird had carried his two little birds to space. “Once it got out of the atmosphere, I could relax,” he says. “I knew it would be fine.” ■

In 2014, a record 132 CubeSats were launched—more than in their first decade. 140 Operating

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DATA SOURCE: JONATHAN MCDOWELL, HARVARD-SMITHSONIAN CFA

an important climate-monitoring satellite. It took 5 years to return a copy of OCO to orbit. Planet Labs, however, still had Doves in space and a production line to make more. Boshuizen took stock: There were enough parts on hand to make 10 Doves immediately. Schingler began calling officials at NASA and at NanoRacks, the company that built the deployers, to see how quickly he could get on a subsequent launch. He worked to transfer regulatory licenses to the replacement satellites. He secured room for two Doves on the next SpaceX resupply mission, scheduled for December. That meant building and boxing up the satellites in record time. The team finished in 9 days. “The team did a major sprint,” Schingler says. “It was a herculean effort.” Two Doves, covered in personalized graffiti (“NBD, all sats burn up someday”), were locked in padded Pelican cases and shipped to NanoRacks’ facility in Webster, Texas. Boshuizen sneaked special features onto each of the spacecraft: One would gather three times as many pixels over a larger field

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*CubeSats that have reentered the atmosphere, are dead in orbit, or failed to launch. As of 10 March 2015.

sion—to travel to near-Earth asteroids and the moon. The moon probe, called Lunar Flashlight, would also use its sail to reflect light into the permanently shadowed craters at the moon’s poles. Jonathan McDowell, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who has studied the history of CubeSats from the start, says the small spacecraft are laying siege to the status quo, in which large teams of scientists build big, budget-busting satellites. “You end up with huge satellites that do 10 different things because you have 10 different stakeholders supporting them.

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That drives up complexity and development time and the cost of failure.” They are also opening space to new participants. According to McDowell, the 29 countries that have launched CubeSats include developing nations such as Vietnam, Peru, and Ecuador. In 2013, a team of high school students in Virginia launched one. Thanks to CubeSats, space is “no longer the domain of the large governments or corporations,” says Bruce Yost, deputy manager of the small spacecraft integrated product team at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. He calls it “the democratization of space.” ■

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